Do you have a friend who’s always doing cool stuff?
You know, that person who learned how to make jewelry out of old circuit boards in their spare time? Who learned to speak Finnish because they “thought it would be fun”? Who you’ve known for ten years, but you just found out they spent a year living in a hut in Fiji and never told you about it?
Well, I get the feeling that Richard Houghten is that kind of friend.
The music he makes is beautiful, yes, but it’s often an unusual beauty. Not bizarre or way-out-there experimental, but an odd twist on something familiar. Imagine the reaction of someone living in 1997 if they were to see a car from 2019. They would recognize it as a car, but certain design elements would be just beyond their personal horizon of what to expect from a car. They would be left startled, intrigued, and impressed.
And so it is with Houghten’s music. Take his track “Moving Pictures,” – a fairly standard Bossa Nova track punctuated by digital weirdness. Or his pair of “All Guitar” albums, on which he creates cover versions of songs by DJ Shadow, Aphex Twin, Flying Lotus, Bonobo and other artists, using only (as you may have guessed) a guitar, yet somehow capturing the synthetic, sample-heavy sound of those acts.
This is someone who isn’t content to march to the beat of a different drummer; he would rather sample that drummer and mix it with field recordings and a string section to create a symphony all his own.
His newest release, “Music for Drifters” features album art as colourful as his own musical palette. There’s plenty to like on the album’s 13 tracks, but this one is currently flying loops in my head.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. Houghten made the album using, as he puts it, “sounds and noises from my environment,” and the percussion feels like the audio equivalent of rummaging through that kitchen drawer where you put things that don’t belong anywhere else.
2. The entire song is built around a 2-bar loop, but somehow I don’t get bored listening to it. It reminds me a bit of the repeating, descending bass line in a track I featured in week 215; it could loop forever and I wouldn’t mind…
3. …but of course it has to end sometime. So why not end with the sound of someone pouring themselves a drink?
Recommended listening activity:
Sketching what you imagine your street will look like in fifty years.